Marcus

“The barrenness of sand, as it is usually pictured, was not caused by simple dryness, but apparently was due to the ceaseless movement that made it inhospitable to all living things. What a difference compared with the dreary way human beings clung together year in year out.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“Kensuke and his wife had, like all bored people, a sense of kindness that was close to disease.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“Yet I have known madness not only in the guise of an evil shadow. I have seen it also as a flash of delight so rich and shattering that the very absence of an immediate object on which it might settle was to me a form of escape.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!

“She wished him very well; but he gave her pain, and his welfare twenty miles off would administer most satisfaction.”
― Jane Austen, Emma